BY ELAINE VAN DEVELDE
Staff Writer
FARRAH MAFFAI staff The luxurious Middletown estate of baseball celebrity John Valentin sits vacant on Navesink River Road. It will go up for auction in February.
MIDDLETOWN — The old adage "Build it and they will come" does not apply to the grandiose Navesink River Road house built by baseball celebrity John Valentin.
A Former Major League Baseball player for the New York Mets, Boston Red Sox and Baltimore Orioles, Valentin’s house will be auctioned off, before he ever moves in, to downsize to more "modest " means.
"Frankly, my priorities changed," Valentin said in a statement issued by Alabama-based J.P. King Auction Co., the company charged with selling the four-story estate.
Set on the banks of the Navesink River and valued at $11.9 million, the estate will be auctioned off on Feb. 26 at 2 p.m., according to the J.P. King Web site.
Valentin, a Holmdel resident, initially planned to build a 20,000-square-foot home on the Middletown property, but it "caused controversy in 1999," township Planning Director Anthony Mercantante said.
"At the time, the neighbors of the house, which borders what is considered the Locust section of town, or the Geraldo [Rivera], Bon Jovi neighborhood, thought that what he had planned was too large for the lot. They also thought the property was too steep to build on and were concerned about erosion issues associated with clearing the sloped areas of vegetation," Mercantante said.
Valentin scaled back the plans by a few thousand square feet to appease his neighbors, "but he still needed some minor variances to build," Mercantante said.
"The area is zoned R-110, which calls for a 2.5-acre minimum lot size. He built it, and it took a while. It was only recently finished after building throughout the past year. After all that, he never moved in," the planning director said.
The custom-built home contains an indoor bowling alley with two lanes, indoor and outdoor pools and a spa, marble and crystal adorned entertainment areas, a media room, an elevator, a commercial-grade kitchen and wine cellar, a five-car garage, an indoor racquetball court and five bedrooms and nine bathrooms, according to the auction Web site.
"Usually a house of that magnitude is harder to sell because it is built to suit a particular person’s architectural and personal preferences," Mercantante said. "It’s usually easier to sell a vacant piece of property that size that will ultimately house a home that is tailor-made for the buyer. That’s why it’s odd that he went through the entire process of design, variances and building and then decided to sell. Frankly, it’s really not that big of a deal. Odd as it is, it happens all the time. This just happens to be a celebrity’s property."